Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

one hand, other hand: why companies need CRM

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July 7, 3:10pm EDT: Inbound telephone call from what must have been a monster.com call center or telemarketing vendor since the area code shown on caller ID was Broward County, Florida, not global HQ in NY nor the local (Maynard Mass.) office. Caller wondered about my business recruiting needs, was getting ready to do the pitch for monster.  Fair enough. Everybody has to make a living.

Except:

I currently have an ad running on monster.com for a marketing/pr assistant. Which my caller did not know. Hmmm…..

Now to be fair, we do have two businesses operating from our lovely Hudson headquarters, GetGood Strategic Marketing and my husband’s computer consulting business, Active Oak LLC. We share the phone number, which was of course in the ad listing 🙂

The monster.com telemarketer had to dial my number somehow, but even if it was a call list generated using a random number generator versus a directory, there is really no excuse, in my mind, for failing to check the numbers against the monster client list. Especially current advertisers 🙂

All that said, I am extremely happy with the responses to my ad, and am willing to forgive monster this slight lapse in business acumen. But…. were it a service that I was less happy with, and I got an equally clueless telemarketing call, I would be far less likely to let it go.

Lesson: if you are doing outbound prospecting or even customer service calling, you should be using an enterprisewide CRM. There is no excuse for a telemarketer not knowing someone they are calling is already a customer.

My .02

YMMV

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R is for ROCKET, P is for PERSPECTIVE

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Well, I am just back from vacation, and still catching up on work, so this post will be mercifully short.

It’s about perspective, people.

Amanda Congdon leaves Rocketboom.

North Korea launches missiles.

Yeah, both news items are about rockets, sort of, but let’s get real: a business split, of a small though high profile tech business, versus ongoing proof that our fearless leader picked the wrong "axis of doom" when looking for weapons of mass destruction.

Sure Amanda is cute and Rocketboom was fun and the ongoing soap opera is like the proverbial train wreck. But, let’s have some perspective.

Troops are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. North Korea is marching irreversibly down a nuclear path. Gas prices are horrendous for consumers as Halliburton and other Cheney friends line their pockets. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the London subway bombings.

Think about it.

Then hug your kids, pat your dogs and cats, kiss your spouse, call your mother. In whatever order floats your boat.

Rocket who?

Peace out.

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BlogHer Unpanel on Business Blogging

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This July at BlogHer, Toby Bloomberg, Yvonne DiVita and I are doing a Business Blogging "Unpanel" on Saturday July 29th.

Here’s the scoop on the session:

This panel isn’t about us. It’s about all of us. Call it an “unpanel.” Call it a “rap session.” What we call it doesn’t matter. What we do, does. And what we are going to do is share our business blogging stories and then build a set of business blogging “best practices” based on our experiences. Everyone is part of the panel, and we’ll just do the best we can to keep up with the brilliance in the room.

Here’s the format. The first half of the session is devoted to case studies. Our goal is eight – we have three committed, so we need  BlogHers who plan to attend the session to step up and volunteer to share yours. How do you do that? Respond to this message (Please respond on the BlogHer site at this link) and tell us “I’m in” and let us know about the blog URL you plan to discuss in July.

During the session you’ll have 5 minutes to tell us the objectives of the blog, what worked, and what didn’t. Giving us the URL in advance lets us all check out the blog so you have to spend less time in exposition. And please, participants, do at least take a look at the blogs volunteered for the session. It will help us all get to the meat, which is creating our best practices deliverable.

Because what’s an unpanel without a collective product [You can see, Susan (who wrote this) really is a socialist at heart.]

The second half of our session is devoted to a group discussion. And we aren’t there just to chat. We want to leave the room with at least the shell of a best practices document –things that work become our best practices, things that didn’t are warning signs. This is the critical piece of this session. Without the deliverable, we’ve had a nice chat. When we create this document, we’ve helped ourselves and others be better business bloggers. Cool, huh.

So, please, if business blogging is your bag, and you are planning to attend this session, consider sharing your story. Yvonne, Toby and Susan can fill the time, but we don’t want to. We want to hear from and talk with you. Way more fun 🙂

Here are the case studies already on deck. Add yours in the comments. First come, first served. Five spots left, and we will do the session in the order received on the BlogHer site.

Masi Guy at http://masiguy.blogspot.com/
Know Your Bones at www.knowyourbones.com
Our Fathers Who Art in Heaven at http://murak.blogs.com/
Research from Stephanie Hendrik, a doctoral student from the University of Sweden: Stephanie will present research about when companies do inauthentic things with blogs. Things like fake blogs and fake commenters. Due to ethical considerations, she is keeping the the blogs in the study anonymous, but she is preparing a brief abstract for us which we’ll post here.

Two questions we know we’ll get:
Q. Can I talk about more than one blog?
A. Yes, but you still only have 5 minutes. Use them wisely.

Q. Will you stop taking volunteers after the 5 spots are filled?
A. Nope, keep signing up. People may decide to go to another session, or that they don’t really want to speak. Some people may take less than 5 minutes so we’ll have extra time. Who knows what will happen. Until it happens! So please sign up. We’ll go in order received until the time allotted for case studies runs out.

If you are planning to attend BlogHer, please consider joining us and sharing your blog case studies. Please sign up on the post at the BlogHer site –it is a whole lot easier if all the sign-ups are in one place. Thanks.

(cross posted to Marketing Roadmaps and MarCom Blog)

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No more 2.0

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After 20 years in high tech, most of them in the software industry, I have definitely internalized the concept of versioning. It’s one of the reasons I dislike the term Web 2.0. In a software release, a major release – signified by a number to the LEFT of the decimal – means new/enhanced features. While I suppose that’s true of the tools and services that are being lumped into the Web 2.0 label, it also means something finished. And that isn’t true of the Web.

I’m going to start using the terminology Doc Searls used in the presentation I saw at Syndicate — Static Web and Live Web. In Doc’s construct the Static Web, we consumed information from Web sites. Yes, the Web was connected, but most of us were passive users of sites developed by others for  information, enjoyment and commerce. In the Live Web, we are all producers — of blogs, podcasts, vlogs. Even Web sites. And the connections are alive, influenced by the audience as well as the original creator. There is no "audience" per se — we all are simultaneously audience and creator. How are we building this Live Web? With social media tools like blogs and tags and wikis and photo sharing tools and podcasts and so on. But these are all just tools that facilitate the connection. The secret sauce? It’s people talking to and learning from one another.

So, Hell no, no more Web 2.0 for me. I’m going with Live Web and social media.

And before I forget, the term "PR 2.0" must go too. For similar reasons. The fundamental practice of PR is still the same as it ever was — it’s all about connections and information and relationships. The tools are just how we accomplish the work. They are NOT the work.

And please don’t get me wrong — I LOVE these new tools. But I don’t think they are the be-all and end-all. They are just tools. Learn how to use them, they’ll make your life and work easier. Better even. But we have to get the fundamentals right first. Otherwise, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. You know — it’s still a pig. Crappy press releases will still be crappy, even if they have del.icio.us pages. Poor pitches aren’t better because they use tags. Blasting a press release to a big list without bothering to verify the list or the interest of the recipients is still borderline spam.

All of this focus on tools reminds me somewhat of a phenomenon from the distant, pre-Internet past. Most of my career, I have been responsible for lead generation at the companies I worked at. One of the hardest jobs is lead tracking — knowing where the leads came from so we can allocate marketing dollars appropriately.Why so hard? Because we rarely have the tools to capture the information we need. Way back when, the top lead source reported by reps nearly everywhere I worked was "Phone." Apparently, it was too damn hard to find out the actual impetus for the inbound call. My response? "Tell them to try and find out or we’ll just spend the marketing budget on new phones and be done with it. No ads. No direct mail. No trade shows. "

Now, the new top lead source tends to be "Internet." Yup, same basic problem. Confusing the tool with the motivation.

We do the same thing when we focus on the social media tools we use in communications and forget about the fundamentals. I’ve had some back and forth with Todd Defren from SHIFT about his social media press release, both here and on his blog PR-Squared. I don’t dislike the format, but I do think it, like the focus on the term PR 2.0, may have unintended, unfortunate consequences.

 In our recent exchanges on his blog and in email, we’ve agreed to try and pull together some sort of panel or workshop or something (wine dinner? Parmet?)  to pull together all these threads and hopefully move the conversation forward. 

But it won’t be called 2.0 anything. Trust me 🙂

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